Why party crowdfunder Tixelated shut down

Consumer tech startups tend to be born to trumpets and ticker tape, and they tend to die in silence. For all the bluster about wearing failure as a "badge of honor," it's rare to actually see a founder actually embrace it, explain what went wrong and what he learned. So many D.C. tech founders exist in the binary state of either crushing it or disconnecting the phones and pretending it never happened. Which is absurd. But here's a rare exception.

Tixelated, a party organizing and funding tool aimed initially at college kids, didn't work out, as founder Philippe Chetritexplained in a blog this week. The operative passage: "After 6 months with a live product, we had serviced about 150 events, had over 1,200 users and helped raise around $20K in party funds. But that was not enough because we had made some pretty fundamental mistakes."

Chetrit, who handed off the co-working space Affinity Lab in order to run the startup, offers up three key lessons around timing, managing the launch and preventing burnout.

"What we ran out of first, before ideas, before money, before time, was steam," he writes. "We spent two years tirelessly working, putting all our time, faith and resources into Tixelated. And what we were getting in return was stress, worry, and emotional haywire."

Eventually, that "moderate success" wasn't enough to overcome the towering load of stress that came with it.

Chetrit closes on an up note: When he told investors, friends and others about the plan to shut down Tixelated, "The overwhelming response was, 'So what? What's next?'"